Hard Way runs tomorrow in the second half of the Tierce at St. Cloud, and Pixie’s Blue runs in the claimer. Both will be ridden by Greg Benoist, who rode Hard Way last time out at Longchamp and who won with Pixie last year. Pixie will go back to a mile over a left-handed track, and she has never looked better in training since she arrived last year. She will go off as a huge outsider because of her weak performances this year, but I think she has a real chance. She has been really unlucky and has plenty of ability. I can’t wait to see what she does tomorrow. Hard Way goes back to the distance he won at, a trip of 3,100 meters. He should have a good chance to win, although he had a slight cough earlier in the week. It seems that was caused by a combination of the change of seasons and dust, because he certainly is not acting or working like a horse with a problem, but it is always a slight worry. We’ll see if it’s a problem tomorrow. If his lungs are clear, he has a great chance to win. Here’s hoping for a double to give me bragging rights when I head off to Santa Anita for the Breeders’ Cup this week.

I got back from four days of the Newmarket horses-in-training sale last night exhausted as usual, but very happy with our purchases. The buyers from Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain made things difficult again (they buy at least 200 horses and up at these sales, all at the bottom end of the market, and they will pay way too much for anything that looks flashy, even if it only has three legs). But we will add four horses to the GallopFrance yard, and I think all of them were outstanding deals. Joining the team: Email Exit (what are they thinking when they name some of these horses? obviously they were trying to find the term for “outbox”), a two-year old colt by Titus Livius, is a full brother to a black type filly. He has only taken a place so far but has made progress with every race and looks like the best is yet to come. Little Brazilien (I had no trouble with this name until one of the young men I was traveling with explained what it meant – if you don’t know, ask someone known to be sexually….adventurous) is a two-year-old Kyllachy filly who has four places from six races. She comes from a winning family and is out of a black type mare. Versaki (no catch to this name; it’s just odd) is a three-year-old winning son of Verglas. And Timelord (clearly the top name of the four) is a two-year-old son of Chineur who has four places from 11 races (including finishing in front of one of the top lots of the sale). We go forward with great hopes for the new arrivals. Watch this space…

Of the two runners I had today, I certainly thought Skid would be the one to hit the board, but it turned out to be the opposite. DerringBay loves Lyon, and finished third (promoted to second after a DQ). Skid finished a disappointing eighth after not being able to accelerate on the tacky ground. Skid ran well with the leaders, but whenever he’s not happy about something his action gets high rather than flat, which is exactly what happened today. He switched leads three times in the stretch trying to dig in, but just couldn’t get hold of the turf which was “collant” (sticky) after getting dumped on with rain overnight. Olivier Peslier said he might do OK on that ground with another run, because often after galloping on good ground all summer, the horses don’t like the surprise of something squishy first time out on bad ground. I think if it had been truly soft rather than tacky, Skid would have been fine, and Peslier agreed. He came back fine, and his next target will be a Tierce at Fontainebleau in mid-November. The ground then is sure to be soft to heavy, so I’m hoping he can act on it next time out. If not, we’ll probably try him on the fibersand at least once before giving him his winter break.

DBay, on the other hand, clearly loves the fibersand and is doing far, far better than I had expected he could. He did really come back confident from his last effort (and seemed completely unflapped by the trailer incident for which I’m still suffering). Unfortunately the race was marred by a nasty accident, with two jockeys down after a horse jumped sideways into another turning into the stretch, causing another to clip heals. I haven’t had time to see the race again, since I was in Deauville, but will now watch the replay. Bay was ridden by Mathias Sautjeau as a replacement for Nadege, who unluckily got caught up in a train snafu and missed the race through no fault of her own. Sautjeau felt he could have won if he hadn’t been had to veer out to avoid the spill, and apparently the horse that caused it all finished in front of us and was disqualified, so we moved from third to second. So I guess we’ll give DBay a break for a couple of weeks and save him for the fibersand in Deauville in December.

Skid Solo makes his second attempt at a Tierce handicap tomorrow, this time in Deauville and this time at his best distance of 1,200 meters. It’s a great purse – 27,000 to the winner – and a field of 16. We’ve got Olivier Peslier up, and as usual, it’s up to Skid because we know he’s got the ability.

Derringbay heads back to the fibersand in Lyon for an 1,800-meter claimer; this time he’s riding in a truck that he can walk straight on and off, but I won’t be with him this time in any case, since I’ll be with Skid in Deauville. He will be well looked after, though, and Nadege will ride. It’s a tougher field this time because it’s a PMU meeting, but if he can repeat the speed he’s shown at home, that could carry him into the money. Unlike me, DBay seems to be feeling fit and fine since his last race.

Now that we’ve established that European racing has its better qualities, who wants to play? We have a half interest in a French yearling called El Camino Real available. He is by Enrique out of a Green Tune mare, is ready to be backed and looks like he will make a very nice two-year-old. Best of all, he’s eligible for French owners premiums, which means 78 percent added to any purse money as a two-year-old, 68 percent as a three-year-old and 48 percent as a four-year-old or older. Anyone interested can contact me by phone or e-mail. Just a reminder, my fees are 55 euros a day (so a half interest will cost you 27.50), which includes everything except vet fees and racing costs. Vet fees in my yard average about 500 euros a year per horse. (And to my American readers, that’s not a typo – it’s an average per YEAR). I’ve got a 10 percent win rate and 20 percent place rate this year, which is about what it should be for a reasonable yard.

I’m also off to my favorite horses-in-training sale at Newmarket next week, for anyone interested in owning an older horse with more immediate potential. I’ve got six horses in the yard at the moment that came from the Newmarket sales. Four of them have won for us, one has placed and one hasn’t yet run. With one exception, they were all bought for less than 8,000 euros.  The exception is Skid Solo, who was bought for about 16,000 euros. He has since won 22,000 euros and I expect him to have a good chance in the Tierce handicap in Deauville on Thursday. There are more than 1,500 horses in the catalog and surely deals to be had; I will be there for all four days.

Last part of the sales pitch: Just a reminder that French prize money is the best in Europe. The average first place purse for a low-level Paris-area claiming race is 8,000 euros. If you win two races, your training bill for the year is nearly paid. So even if your horse doesn’t have the French-bred premiums, you stand a good chance of breaking even. If you DO have a French horse, things get even more interesting. Hard Way, my home-bred, won 17,000 euros so far this year, but the French premium took that total to 25,000. I expect him to add to those winnings before the year is over.

Oh yeah, one more thing: Champagne flows freely whenever your horse runs, no matter where he finishes! (It flows even more freely when they win…)

I thank everyone for their comments of support on my previous posts; I feel very strongly about these issues and if there’s a crusade to change American racing, sign me up for the front lines. I do want to take a minute, though to defend Patrick of the Thoroughbred Bloggers Alliance, a tremendous organization without which many of you would never know I existed. Yes, Patrick made the decision to hold back the post, but if he hadn’t done that, someone at the NTRA would have. He knows the score over there, and I think he is just as disappointed as many of the rest of us bloggers about how the whole thing is going. Patrick is one of the good guys, and he told me he agrees with most (not all, but most) of the things in my post. But he also knows how thick the wall is and what does or doesn’t pass through the cracks. While I am someone who prefers to smash through the wall and damn the consequences, Patrick knows that won’t work and has the finesse to try a gentler way (and finesse is something I have never been attributed with having).  We’ll all keep fighting the battle in our own way, but I just want to thank Patrick for working tirelessly to try to put together something he thought would be good for all of us.

As I mentioned in my blog about a month ago, I’m doing some side-blogging for the National Thoroughbred Racing Association leading up to the Breeders’ Cup, commenting on the European contenders. It turns out, though, that the folks at that site aren’t too interested in anything that might be controversial, so the following post I wrote for them was deemed unsuitable. In the interest of not wasting my work, here is the post I had offered (and actually, I thought it was pretty toned down compared to what I usually say about these subjects):

Many of the comments flying around the Internet about Sea the Stars and other European contenders for the Breeders’ Cup point up the vast differences between European and American racing, and it usually deteriorates into an “U.S. vs. Them” mentality. And I’ll be the first to put up my hand: I’m a convert to the European way and I’m very quick to defend it. This is in large part because I’m American, and I feel like it would be out of the question to ever be able to train horses in my native country under the current system.

The main difference between the two systems is, of course, medication. I couldn’t agree more with the person who commented (on the NTRA blog) that he was glad Sea the Stars would not have to face the choice of running on Lasix. I, too, was relieved that the Tsui family decided not to come to Santa Anita. In Europe, no race-day medication is allowed, period. No Lasix, no bute, no anything. Unfortunately, when European trainers race in America, many feel they have to use the permitted medications because they’ll be at a disadvantage if they don’t. Some resist, and with success. Pascal Bary won Breeders’ Cup races with Domedriver and Six Perfections and neither raced on medication.

I’ve heard all the American arguments about why horses there “need” to run on drugs. Which brings up another big difference between the two systems: American horses, for the most part, are stabled and trained at the same track where they race, and those tracks are usually located close to major cities and the pollution that comes with them. The tracks are usually quite tight by European standards, not usually more than a mile around, and the horses go through the same routine every day, galloping the same direction around the same tight turns. Most races are short by European standards, so you have horses sprinting around a tight turn, always in the same direction, usually with a shot of bute and lasix to ease the pain. What could go wrong?

In Europe, horses train in rural training centers, galloping on the Newmarket heath or winding through the forests around Chantilly and Maisons-Laffitte. They are trucked to the track on race day, and the track surfaces and distances are varied. Races are run on the straight, left-handed, right-handed and often with rolling terrain. And most of our racing is on the turf, although there are more and more synthetic sand tracks, which many American detractors refer to as “plastic.” The emphasis is on stamina, and 2,400 meters, or a mile and a half, is considered a middle distance race, not a stayers’ contest.

Another difference between the two systems is the U.S. obsession with reducing the sport to a mathematical formula. Timed workouts, track records and speed figures have pretty much removed the actual living horse from the equation. The object seems not to win the race, but to win it by as many lengths as possible and maybe set a track record in the process. Which brings us to the next difference: The use of the whip. I was appalled when I saw the video of Calvin Borel flogging Rachel Alexendra to the finish in the Haskell when clearly the filly had the race won. He would have been stood down for several days in Europe with that performance. Here, the rules say a jockey must give the horse time to respond to the whip before using it again, the number of strikes is limited and the whip hand cannot be raised above the shoulder. Thankfully, the International Federation of Horseracing Authorities agreed recently to crack down on the use of the whip worldwide.

The Federation also urged U.S. racing authorities to consider banning race-day medication at least in Group 1 races. I wish them luck, but closing the Pandora’s Box of pharmaceuticals in the United States will not be easy. The partial steroid ban that most U.S. jurisdictions have enacted over the past two years is a step in the right direction, and the strong European showing at last year’s Breeders’ Cup shows that the field is slowly being leveled. There is a long way to go before America can really be a part of international racing, but I keep hoping for change. Despite the defection of Sea the Stars, I’m hoping for a strong showing from Europe again this year. And I hope that one day I get lucky enough to have a horse good enough to think about bringing to America for the Breeders’ Cup, and that by then, no one will have to face the choice of running on Lasix.

A minor miracle happened Sunday when Derringbay managed to finnish 2nd of 12 runners in a maiden race on the fibersand in Lyon. He ran really well; the winner was unbeatable (for us, anyway) and he ran far better than I expected.  I was worried about his habit of hanging left on such a tight, right-handed track, but with a brush added to the left side of his bit, he handled it well. I put Nadege back in the saddle, and she rode a great race. All was well…except…I trailered him down with Theirry for company; Derringbay loaded with no trouble and took the trip like a seasoned traveler. Until it was time to unload. Turns out Derringbay is a one-way horse, and that way is forward. He doesn’t do back, and shoving him out of he trailer was akin to childbirth. I ended up shoving my backside into his chest, grabbing onto the side bars and pushing like I was having triplets. At one point, and I’m not making this up, I saw both of his front feet leave the ground, meaning the entire front half of a 500-kilo animal was perched on my backside. (Must be those Eastern-European plow-horse roots I have.) Anyway, out he finally came, we ran the race, loaded up for home and then wondered how we were going to extract him at midnight in Maisons-Laffitte. It turns out our concerns were well-founded. Three hours, three people, one vet, two IV shots of tranquilizer and several broken ribs (mine) later, we ended up letting him do what he wanted to do originally: jump through the front door, which is not exactly designed for this sort of thing. The first attempt to push him out the back way like I did at the track ended with him backing out half way, panicking, stumbling back into the trailer on his knees and then mashing me against the front bar because I wasn’t quite quick enough in avoiding the worst. Much, much profanity and struggling for breath later, we tried again (with Theirry doing the pushing), to no avail. We tried the nice way, with apples and food, and the not nice way, with brooms and whips, but the response was always the same: one step back and then a panicked jump forward. Chantal got in on the action. No better. We backed up the trailer to his box and slammed feed buckets around. Nope. We pulled, pushed and prodded, but it was hopeless. That’s when I called the vet. Tranq him just enough and we’ll push. We did. He didn’t. Finally, we padded the sides of the front door with styrofoam (god only knows where Chantal was able to lay her hands on exactly something that worked at 2:30 a.m.), put a heavy canvas rug on the horse and drove the trailer to the side of the sand track, so that if he made a crash landing there would be fewer pieces to pick up. Out he came, without a scratch. I drove myself over to the hospital.

“When did this happen,” they asked.

“About three hours ago.”

“Why didn’t you come in right away?”

“Had to extract the horse from the trailer first.”

They think I’m insane. They’re probably right.

I’m finally getting a chance to catch up with things after an incredibly busy Arc weekend. With runners on Friday and Saturday and a lot of entertaining to do leading up through the race, it’s been exhausting but fun. I met a great group of Americans on Friday at St. Cloud, and one of them came for a stable visit this morning. On Saturday, Hard Way did his bit – oh, yeah, there was some other horse called Goldikova running that day, too. Hers was the only race I got to see besides our own handicap. I suppose there was a lot of shock around her defeat, but the 1,400-meter course at Longchamp is very particular, and there are horses that specialize at that distance and she’s not one of them. She’ll still go to the Breeders’ Cup to run the Mile, and she’ll probably win there. Meanwhile, our group of owners were happy just to participate during Arc weekend and even happier with Hard Way’s good showing. We all went off to the sales after racing, where we saw people with more money than sense paying silly prices for horses in training. Then it was off to dinner at a friend’s house; very hard to get up the next morning after all that, but work the horses we did, and in time to get to the Big Show, too.

We had a great table of 12 in the paddock restaurant. Thankfully, I had planned ahead, because I saw a lot of well-dressed but very sad-looking English visitors gnawing on horrible baguette sandwiches, which was the only fare on offer outside of the restaurants. Like I said in a previous post – eat before you come is the rule for French racing unless you’re going to pay up for a table. Our lunch was great, and decent value on Arc day at 110 euros a person, which included wine and a good-sized flute of Champagne.

I snuck away several times to duck back to the stables to see His Highness (no, not the Aga Khan but Sea the Stars). The lads handling him could not have been nicer, and let us give the colt a scratch or two on the head before and after the race. The horse is the most relaxed thoroughbred I’ve ever seen. He had had an endless stream of visitors all day, and he couldn’t have cared less, obliging his public with a tolerance unseen in most draft horses. “He’s just a horse like any other one at the end of the day,” one of the lads said. “He doesn’t know he’s any more important than any of the others here.” Indeed.

But speaking of His (other) Highness, the Aga Khan had a hell of a weekend, winning just about everything that didn’t involve Sea the Stars. Just about every time you looked up you saw the green and red silks in the winner’s circle. Not that the Aga Khan doesn’t win his fair share of races all year long, but seven races – including five Group 1′s – in two days is unbelievable. But it couldn’t happen to a nicer, glassier guy. The Aga Khan is, of course, part of that circle of owners who are rich beyond what most of us could imagine. Still, he always takes time to talk to the press; on the subject of his breeding program that resulted in the weekend’s success, he said “It’s important to stay humble, and to have the courage to say ‘I don’t know. I will learn.’”

And speaking of those who are rich but still nice, I finally got the chance to meet the legendary Maggie Bryant, an American who is one of the leading owners of steeplechasers in France. The France Galop gate thugs were actually denying her access to the stable area because she didn’t have a runner that day. I was stunned. I got her a bracelet to gain access, and I gave her my card. Who knows?

Meanwhile, back at the yard, Hard Way seems to come back from his race fine. He has a small knock on the inside of his back left leg, but it’s superficial and will heal quickly. He’s still asking for his Guinness. Tyke also seems to have come back pretty well, but now that Sea the Stars has left the country, it has started to rain. And Tyke. like his distant but much, much-faster shirt-tail brother, doesn’t like heavy going, so we may have to wait for the Deauville fibersand series for him. Turfani seems to be on the mend, and the rest of them are coming along. We shake off the glow of the unattainable (for now, anyway) Group races and toil ahead. For us, a Tierce will be as good as a Group 1. We’ve got one of those to win in about 10 days time. Onward.

Hard Way ran third in the handicap yesterday at Longchamp, a pretty solid performance in the 20-horse field. He was stuck fourth on the rail for most of the race, and the pace was crawling, which didn’t suit him very well. But he finished like a bomb, showing he can handle the shorter distance of 2,400 meters. He was taking on much better company this time, and it was very cool to be in the money on Arc weekend. He handled the commotion and the crowd (there actually was one) very well. Now I can relax a bit and go back today to enjoy watching the Big Horses in the Arc. Can’t wait to see Sea the Stars in the flesh!